And so it begins...
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 at 09:16AM So. I got this wild hare to actually do some yard improvements. We've lived in this house almost ten years now and haven't really done anything to the yard aside from take care of the grass. ;) We easily agree that we'd *like* different landscaping (we have all sorts of ideas)...but we'd truly rather wait until we have enough money to just pay someone else to do it for us, lol.
Regardless, I convinced Nathan that we should at least do some tidying up in the front yard. I'm mostly still standing behind this decision. ;)
So, we bought some edgers, thinking we'd use them to line the grass border after removing the metal barriers there now (I hate the metal barriers...I know they're efficient and all but they hurt and I just don't like them). Over the course of last weekend, then, I worked on removing all the stupid grass that had been growing in the rocky area. (Sidenote, we also hate our rocks. Whomever picked them was evil. If you'd like them and are willing to haul them, you can have them. Honest...contact me!) It all started out looking like this:
If you look in the bottom right corner, you can see where I've begun to remove the grass. Yeah. That's a lot of grass to get out of evil rocks and it sucked. My hands ache. (I bought a $20 kneeler thing at Lowes and it was totally, totally worth it!) This is actually the side of the house and is not actually finished beyond what's pictured. I'll get to it eventually. Really. ;)
In the meantime, though, I did finish the main front yard area, which was a pain in the butt but now looks so much cleaner:
(You can't really tell at all since I neglected to take a "before" picture, but I also pruned some branches and cleared out a bunch of debris on the ground. I mention this because you can't really tell and I should get credit, lol.)
While I was working on that, Nathan was tackling the removal of our bushes...that we both hate and that were mostly dying finally anyhow...
He was not happy about this.
Removal sucked. But he got to buy a maddox, so that made him a little bit happier. ;) After getting all the bushes out, he tilled all the soil under there (also first had to remove all the evil rocks...we now have a lovely pile in the backyard corner...but we're not doing the backyard yet, so there...if you'd like them, seriously let me know!) with clay buster stuff and compost stuff as directed by the nice man at the Fort Collins Nursery.
Yes, in between removing the bushes and readying the soil, we made a little trip to the nursery to find some plants. We'd toyed with filling the area with pavers and ground cover or finding sod and just being done with that strip. For varying reasons, we didn't go those routes. So. Plants. A lovely lady named Gail helped us figure out what to plant. (I basically just found the employee it looked like all the other employees were going to with their questions and said "help me!" lol. She was awesome.)
Here's what we ended up with last night finally...(we finished up just as it started to rain)...
Whew.
And, yes, you may have noticed that we ended up using most all of the edgers just in this area. We decided that it wasn't worth the work to pull up the metal in the other areas since you wouldn't really see the edgers anyhow. I'll live with the metal and try to stay on top of the things encroaching. (Yes, we realize that really we should pull up all the evil rocks (which we'd love to have someone else do) and put down new barrier stuff and all that. That's a bigger project than we can take on right now...so maintenance will have to do.)
So, now...
- I have to exercise patience and wait for things to grow. :)
- I'm also working on finishing up a couple of containers/pots near the front door.
- Nathan's going to take that last bush out, too (the big one in the back between the trees). And then we'll figure out something to put there, maybe a bench or some chairs? (I'm not holding my breath that this will happen in the near future. Nathan's been a good sport about it all (thank you, my love!), but I think it would be asking too much to get him out there again soon, lol.)
- I'll eventually finish pulling out the grass along the front side of the house.
And that will mostly cover our front yard plans for this year. (Someday I'd also like to replace the front door and the outdoor lights and house numbers and stuff. And I wouldn't mind replacing a couple of the trees...and maybe doing some plantings around the bases of the trees...)
Also. Please don't look at our backyard. We put all the stuff from the front yard there. ;) (And I can't tell you about any plans for back there because Nathan would definitely throw things at me... )
Reader Comments (3)
Everything looks great!!! We just had some landscapers come give us an estimate on ripping out all the junk in our backyard. The people that used to own our house did NOTHING to the yard and it's wreck. I love how your bricks/stones look!
Amanda, this looks great! Having things look the way YOU want when you come home is SO nice. I also think removing rocks would be a GREAT way for the boys to earn some money!
We've been in our home 19 years, and we just about have our yards the way we want them. For years we had weedy flower gardens, etc. Just can't keep up when the kids are little. But almost every year for the past 10 we'd buy 100 or so pavers when they went on sale, and cleaned up/mulched another area of the garden, and put a few perennials in here & there, and just what we could keep up with too.
Of course, there are still things to do to the house, and probably always will be. and let's not talk about the garage we've been threatening/promising to paint for the past 10. Peeling white looks nice and rustic with pink peonies and purple wisteria, right?
Looks very nice! Worth all the work! And do I see a new fence in one of the pictures? Did the neighbor do that or was it a joint project?